Be Your Own Editor

In the words of Mark Twain:

I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. … There are subtleties which I cannot master at all,—they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me,—and this adverb plague is one of them. … Yes, there are things which we cannot learn, and there is no use in fretting about it. I cannot learn adverbs; and what is more I won’t.

Then again, Henry James said, “I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.” So who’s right? Both. Adverbs are perfectly respectable words that, like any others, should be used but used right. And too often, they’re not.

I’ve written before about the fact that strong writing most often employs nouns and verbs rather than strings of adjectives and adverbs, and I won’t go over that again here. But I will address just a few examples of adverb misuse or overuse that bug me and writers everywhere.

• “Too many adverbs with dialogue tags,” she said testily. Dialogue tags themselves should be used only when necessary for clarity or when they provide information not in the dialogue itself. Too many writers allow themselves to be lazy about conveying emotion, subtle or not-so-subtle, in the dialogue itself, and instead throw an “angrily” or a “cheerfully” or a “gloomily” in the tag. If you want to express something about a character’s state of mind that isn’t expressed in the dialogue, a more effective way to do so is through gesture, e.g.:

  “Too many adverbs with dialogue tags.” She tapped her pencil on the desk so hard the tip broke off.

• “More important”; “more importantly.” Traditionally, copyeditors will change the latter to the former, but authors often question this decision. In speech, most people say “more importantly” or “most importantly.” I prefer “most important,” because “important” describes the statement that follows (”Most important, he told her he loved her”). “Most importantly,” to me, can be interpreted as meaning “He told her he loved her importantly,” which is something entirely different.

  Having said that, “importantly” has become so commonly used that Webster’s tells us both forms are acceptable. So use whichever sounds best to you, but be prepared to get into a battle with a copyeditor over it.

• Firstly, “firstly” sounds stupid. A similar case arises with terms such as this one, which, like the previous example, most often (not “most oftenly”) introduces a sentence or clause. Don’t bother looking it up: “firstly” is indeed in Webster’s as an adverb, meaning “first.” But while we’re going for economy of language, why not go for economy of letters, too? Why say “firstly” when “first” will do and, to me, sounds much less awkward.

With apologies to Mark Twain: adverbs are not to be dismissed. Still, he has a point that they’re difficult words to use well. The purpose they serve can often be fulfilled more effectively by nouns or verbs. So take a look at your manuscript and, if it’s riddled with the letters l and y in places they need not be, think about making some alternate stylistic decisions.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 11:57 am and is filed under Writing/Editing Tips: Nuts and Bolts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.